If he was old enough to rape me, he is old enough to hang

Today, the verdict is out. And the guilty will be sentenced within a few hours. My family and friends want the perpetrators to be sent to gallows for a wrongdoing that has eventually shaken the conscience of an entire nation. For, my gang-rape and murder was one of its kind in the annals of urban crime.

But more than eight months after my death, the archaic laws of this country pain me even more. I need a reply from the law of the land why the so-called minor, who clawed out my intestines after sexually abusing me twice, will go scot-free after just three years in a reform home.

If the so-called juvenile was old enough to rape me, he is old enough to be hanged — that’s what I believe and that is how it should be. Why has he been allowed to live? So that he can rape and kill another girl once he is out of the reform home after 28 months? Six of them raped me by turns. While one of them shoved a rod inside, another one used his hand to tear my organs out.

They murdered me, but I did not die on December 29, 2012. I am dying now. I am dying every single moment that the so-called juvenile breathes after getting just a three-year sentence for an act that would even put animals to shame. And I will continue to die till he lives. In India, the smallest sense of outrage, whether it is miscarriage of justice or rampant corruption, can bring people out in sombre candle-light processions on streets. Or it can launch torrents of online activism. It happened at a much larger scale in my case when I left my body at a Singapore hospital.

All I want now is a fair deal. I want justice. It has taken almost nine months for the guilty to be brought to the book. “Burn them alive,” this is what I had stated in my four-page statement to the magistrate.

Insensitivity, unfathomable brutality and such savagery should not go unpunished. I lay there as a mere victim or rather a ‘fun’ quotient for the men who were drunk and chilling out on the streets of the national capital that night. I was there, in excruciating pain and dishonour, helpless and disgraced,when my cries went unheeded. In the hospital, I used to cry in shame and anger. When the whole world rose up in protest and anguish, how I wished India had forward-looking laws and justice was a little fast paced. For all these months, my soul has experienced unspeakable trauma and indignity, waiting for justice and hoping that the guilty would be given the severest of punishments.

Up here, there are several women like me who were raped and murdered. And all of us wail in silence every time a new woman joins our tribe: it gets bigger with each passing day!

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